Copy Files on a Local Network with bcp

Productivity Sauce

Feb 25, 2013 GMT

Dmitri Popov

Need to quickly copy a file between machines on a local network? There are several tools that can do the job, including bcp. This tiny utility lets you broadcast and fetch individual files on the local network. To deploy bcp, grab the latest source code from the project's GitHub repository and compile it:

git clone git://github.com/jwilberding/bcp.git
cd bcp
make

Move the created bcp binary to the /usr/bin directory, and make it executable by running the chmod +a /usr/bin/bcp command as root. To share a file, use the bcp filename command which broadcasts the file on the network. To fetch the file from any other machine on the network, simply issue the bcp command. No muss, no fuss.